Public health is a human rights issue. Medical services, though, are ultimately ruled by economics. The tension between the two will never be resolved. It will, however, shape our future in ways that are impossible to measure.

This morning over coffee, I received news that the 15 year old daughter of a friend had passed away. She’d been ill for over a month, but a full diagnosis was never made. All anyone knew was that her head ached terribly.

Within an hour of hearing this, I learned of the untimely death of Ture Kailo, MP for TAFEA Outer Islands.

Ture was well known in Vanuatu. During his tenure as DG of the Ministry of Youth Development and Training, he was a consistent champion of youth issues and a friend to many local NGOs. Many took heart when, after his politically motivated ouster from the Ministry, he announced his candidacy for national office. Everyone I spoke to expressed deep regret at his passing, noting that Vanuatu politics has suffered a real and measurable loss.

Cases like these often define the debate over national health care policy. The loss of prominent individuals like Kailo demonstrate in unambiguous terms just how much we stand to lose when we lose a single life.

But what of my friend’s young daughter? The magnitude of her mother’s loss is of course immeasurable. And who can tell what she might have achieved?

I am a firm believer in the need to personalise issues such as education and health care. Unless we can see the effects of our decisions, unless we can put ourselves in a position where we share the burden of their costs and the value of their rewards, we are far too susceptible to error.

There is, however, a tension between the moral weight of our decisions and their practical implementation. Simply stated, public medicine is costly, time-consuming and requires significant planning and coordination. Vanuatu as a nation has fared poorly in meeting any of these challenges. Money is limited, skilled professionals are thin on the ground and coordination even inside a single hospital is often the result of improvisation, not planning.

It’s tempting to see the death of these two individuals (and the countless others who might have been saved, had circumstances been different) in a tragic light. The young woman had been complaining of terrible pain in her head for over a month. Her initial visit to the doctor produced no result. It’s quite likely that, with better facilities, equipment and training, they might not have failed in that regard.

But Kailo’s tragic loss tells us too that sometimes, even with world-class medical facilities available, fate conspires against us. Having been hospitalised in Sydney myself for an emergency surgical procedure, I can attest to the quality and professionalism of the Australian medical system. Their best efforts did not suffice to save this man’s life.

We have to admit the possibility that even if we had been able to diagnose this young woman’s condition, we might still have been powerless to save her.

The emerging dialogue around health as a human right was questioned recently in an article in the Financial Times. William Easterly, a professor of economics and co-director of the Development research Institute, claims that the application of generic moral arguments is indeed persuasive, but sometimes in the wrong ways. He compares the respective budgets of HIV/AIDS campaigns and those combating tuberculosis and malaria. Each kills about the same number of people every year in southern Africa, but, “Aids accounted for 57 per cent of World Bank projects on communicable diseases from 1997 to 2006, compared with 3 per cent for malaria and 2 per cent for TB.”

Others pointed out that Easterly complaint should be against the implementation of medical programmes, not their inspiration.

Those who argue for health as a human right deal at length with participation as the key to successful achievement of “the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, without discrimination of any kind.” Here, particularly, is an area where Vanuatu has a very long way yet to go.

When my friend’s daughter first showed signs of illness, she was not taken to the doctor. Instead, she was treated with kastom medicine, to no avail. As is far too often the case, by the time doctor’s at Vila Central Hospital finally saw her, her condition was well advanced.

People might get more out of public health services if they expected more from them. But by treating western medicine as a last resort, by treating hospitals as a place where we’re born and where we die, we deny ourselves any other possibility.

Many would argue that our medical services are treated that way because that’s all they are. Resources are so limited that, besides the occasional perfunctory dose of antibiotics, our hospitals are only geared to basic lifesaving interventions.

And that brings us full circle. Until we can re-imagine public health as something that affects us all – and that consists of more than medical intervention after the fact – we will continually find ourselves stuck in the same quagmire of overstretched, overburdened resources, fighting a losing intervention against cruel fate.

Health is a human right. And that right starts with participation. And participation starts at home.

Education, prevention, awareness and healthy living might not be enough to save the lives of the two we lost today. But they do save lives. The problem is, our economists will never know it. They cannot measure the effectiveness of medical outcomes because if all goes right there won’t be any.

Health policy should be personal; it has to matter to us all. But the resources available are finite. That does not mean, however, that the outcomes are. Listening to both instinct and reason at once is a tenuous task. But that is precisely what all of us, politicians and public alike, will have to do if we want public health to improve in Vanuatu.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

When Isaac Newton first formulated his third law of motion, he codified a long-observed phenomenon. Wits have suggested a fourth law: ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’

At the Lowy Institute’s recent conference, The Pacific Islands and the World, attendees witnessed two contrasting views of Vanuatu. The gathering, timed to coincide with the Pacific Forum, was attended by dignitaries from major global institutions as well as government leaders from throughout the region. It was billed as an opportunity to discuss the impact of the global economic crisis on vulnerable Pacific Island nations.

By all accounts, though, Vanuatu has been less affected than the global economic giants. Mid-year numbers do indicate a slight slow-down, but in real terms, our economy’s still growing fairly well. In a recently published briefing paper by the Pacific Institute of Public Policy, Nikunj Soni and the Australian National University’s professor Stephen Howes point to tourism and construction as the leading drivers of this growth.

But they are quick to note that the environment is as critical to this success as the actual business opportunities. One noteworthy chart clearly shows the rise in economic activity starting in 2003, about the same time as major budgetary and macro-economic reforms began to take hold in Vanuatu.

The briefing paper goes on to highlight the fact that none of this growth would have been possible without social stability. That may seem like so much common sense to some. Civil disturbance and political turmoil are seldom on a tourist’s must-see list. Likewise with home buyers.

But what brings this stability about?

What is it about Vanuatu that has allowed it to avoid civil strife like that which recently wracked the Solomon Islands? How, despite the incessant game of political musical chairs, do we still manage to avoid the coup/counter-coup culture that has beset Fiji since its independence? How do we avoid the overtly racist violence and rioting that have left the business communities in numerous PNG cities in a state of siege?

There are a hundred possible answers, all of them partial.

The most coherent interpretation of the source of Vanuatu’s stability was presented at the Lowy Conference by MP Ralph Regenvanu. His talk discussed the Custom Economy. “The traditional economy,” writes Regenvanu, “constitutes the political, economic and social foundation of contemporary Vanuatu society.”

Regenvanu goes on to observe that the one of the reasons urban dwellers have avoided hardship is precisely because their meager earnings are subsidised by traditional family networks that provide access to “food and other resources and… provide manual labour, child care and aged care, [as well as] dealing with their disputes in the traditional way.”

The traditional economy is innately conservative. It rewards egalitarian behaviour and benefits the community more than to the individual. Free market capitalism, on the other hand, rewards personal initiative and the accumulation of wealth and resources.

As a recent World Bank report observed, land sales – one of the drivers of our recent economic boom – are usually conducted on a context that leaves traditional land-owners at a distinct disadvantage.
It’s tempting to say that Vanuatu’s economy is eating its children. The very conditions that make growth possible are being undermined by the growth itself.

Newton’s fourth law in action.

The increasing – but certainly not intractable – tension that exists between the traditional and modern economies needs to be reconciled. Before that can happen, though, a great deal more research will be required.

The process of understanding will be a messy, decidedly un-scientific affair. While Vanuatu’s economic managers have made great strides in systematising their economic analysis, their tools and metrics just don’t translate usefully into the custom economy. While the movement of cash can ultimately be tracked as closely as time and resources allow, the same cannot reasonably be said about the often intangible inputs and outputs of the kastom economy.

It’s one thing to draw up a spreadsheet of VAT revenues per sector and use them to extrapolate domestic business activity. It’s another thing entirely to track the movement of mats and yams between families and to infer from them the potential for employment stability brought about by renewed alliances.

But the situation is far from hopeless. This year’s census data, combined with the results of the agriculture survey, will no doubt provide some valuable insight into land use and agricultural activity. This is turn can help us begin to quantify the phenomenon that MP Regenvanu has been describing for years now.

But we will almost certainly find that scientific analysis will only get us so far. We know that a tension exists between the modern and custom economies. We’re going to need something more than a few spreadsheets and graphs to learn how to diffuse the tension between them and allow each to exert appropriate amounts of inertia and momentum on the other.

Vanuatu’s policy makers have no choice but to weave science and kastom together, respecting the laws of both if they want to be able to ensure both prosperity and stability in Vanuatu.

A prominent US liberal blog recently ran a story, titled “So Go Already” that captured in a nutshell the deep resentment that many, Americans especially, are feeling toward those captains of enterprise who continued to receive massive payouts even as the financial service companies they guided were foundering in bankruptcy.

Reacting to a rather blithe and blinkered editorial on tax havens published by the right wing Washington Times, the article ranted, “If you don’t like paying taxes here on the millions you’ve made or that someone made for you, you’re free to take your shekels and move.”

Both Right and Left utterly miss the point.

These ill-informed rants paint tax havens as a place to hide one’s (possibly ill-gotten) riches. That might have been true in the past, but following the events of September 11, 2001, reporting requirements have changed significantly. New rules proposed at the recent G20 summit in London would make reporting requirements even more stringent than they are today.

Righteous anger felt by many hard working individuals toward financial managers who received multi-million dollar rewards for having failed so spectacularly at their job is venting in all directions. And now, some in Vanuatu feel they’re being made to pay for others’ sins.

Not so, says Nikunj Soni, Executive Director of the Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP). While the Pacific region is home to 6 of the 38 formally declared tax havens in the world, not all of them will be affected by the proposed new reporting requirements mooted at the G20 summit.

The only nations facing significant sanctions are Malaysia, the Philippines and Costa Rica, members of the notorious OECD ‘Black List’ – tax haven countries that are subject to sanctions as a result of their non-compliance with international taxation and reporting standards.

A PiPP press statement notes, “the G20 communiqué does not seek to punish tax havens – only ‘non-cooperative jurisdictions’ – that is, only those countries on the black list.”

Vanuatu is not entirely out of the woods. As a member of the so-called Grey List of countries who have committed to international tax standards, but who have yet to conclude any bilateral tax treaties, Vanuatu would be subject to monitoring. Sanctions might eventually come into play if we don’t show willing when new reporting and information sharing requirements are put forth, but that’s not terribly likely.

When the pressure starts, Soni says, “it is in the industry’s interest to become more open about its activities.”

That should not present a problem. The point of tax havens is not money laundering, nor is it tax evasion. Some have tried to abuse the system for those purposes, and in fairness, lax standards did in the past make such abuse far easier than it should have been. But no longer.

The rationale for acting as a tax-free jurisdiction is simple: Given a lack of sustainable industry, a small economic base and few prospects for international trade, tax haven status is one of the few avenues available to countries like Vanuatu to attract foreign currency. By enticing money and people into the country, the government is able to derive income from import tariffs, license fees and other activities that don’t unduly burden either investors or ni-Vanuatu.

Some degree of visible, verifiable probity is required for such a role, and cooperation will no doubt be expected from neighbouring nations as they pursue individuals playing fast and loose with the rules. But this should not be cause for alarm. We don’t want people investing here who only see the rule of law as an encumbrance.

Nonetheless, we’re facing a strong, even unreasonable backlash, which is directing itself in part at some of the punier members of the international community. Great care, and large helpings of wit and diplomacy, will be required as we sit down with OECD member nations to discuss the issue.
On the one hand, we need to show willing in terms of information exchange, but on the other, we cannot afford to give away entirely one of our only means of attracting foreign investment.

The same week this news was announced, Vanuatu embarked on the opening movements of a multilateral dance between its Pacific neighbours and local economic heavyweights Australia and New Zealand. With our two largest donor partners leaning on us to reduce trade tariffs on the one side and the OECD on the other pressuring us to move into line on tax policy, Vanuatu cannot afford to assume that everything will be hunky-dory.

Says Soni, “If the industry is to get Pacific governments to support its cause on the international stage, it will need to demonstrate the contributions to economic growth, which in turn will require a degree of openness and trust.”

It’s a fine balance, but a manageable one, if all parties play nicely. A fair amount of cooperation will be required, and some of that may feel a little uncomfortable to financial management companies here. Foreign governments are going to be looking at them askance, and the people of Vanuatu cannot afford to sacrifice much for either side’s benefit.

“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau offered this wry description of relations between Canada and the US at the Washington Press Club back in 1969. Had he been a ni-Vanuatu politician addressing the press in Canberra, he might have used an aquatic simile, but the message would have been the same.

In recent years, Vanuatu has been learning to manoeuvre in this demanding and rather tricky role. To further complicate things, there is more than one elephant in this particular bed. Between the EU, the WTO, China and our other regional neighbours, trade and aid negotiators in Vanuatu have had their hands full.

Happily, 3000 years of practice in patient negotiation and peace-making have so far paid off. To mix metaphors, Vanuatu has of late consistently punched well above its weight when it comes to negotiating this sometimes parlous state of affairs.

But our work isn’t finished yet, and if anything, the stakes are higher now than they’ve been in years. Time is not on our side and the elephants are encroaching once again.

Much has been made recently of Vanuatu’s renewed negotiations toward accession to the World Trade Organisation, or WTO. It reached the brink of an agreement in 2001, but wisely backed away when it became clear that trade conditions would be imposed on it that were far worse than those of major developed nations.

Some developed nations saw the action as a sign of outright temerity and presumption, but Vanuatu stuck to its guns, and this latest round of negotiations could see Vanuatu losing very little ground as the price of accession. ‘Could’, of course, is a pretty big word in this context.

The Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP) this week released a briefing paper on trade negotiations throughout the Pacific region. It notes that, “The WTO General Council has since agreed to provide more flexibility on the accession of [Least Developed Countries, of which Vanuatu is one]. It remains to be seen if Samoa and Vanuatu (set to re-start accession discussions in 2008) will benefit from this special treatment.”

The report goes on to describe Tonga’s experience. In spite of its LDC status, it was required to drop many subsidies and to keep tariff rates to an average 20%, very low by Pacific standards.

Tariffs are one of the main sources of revenue for the Government of Vanuatu. Negotiating them away, no matter what the potential benefits, is not a step to be taken lightly.

Worse, we don’t have a lot of time to deliberate. Vanuatu looks set to graduate from its LDC status by 2013. If and when that happens, we’ll lose a lot of moral traction.

The EU recently flexed its muscle in the region, requiring Fiji and PNG to sign up to its rather punitive Economic Partnership Agreements in order to maintain access to European markets for their tuna and sugar exporters. Vanuatu and other countries didn’t have as much to lose from this threat, because they export very little to European countries. As a result, they were able to slip aside before the elephant rolled over on them.

Life with our pachyderm bed-mates may require a little nimbleness and tact, but a trade agreement is like getting married to one. When it comes time to consummate the affair, you really, really want to make sure that the mouse is the groom, not the bride.

The prospects for future happiness may not seem terribly rosy, but there’s a limit to what Vanuatu can achieve. Whether we like it or not, the status quo is simply not an option. We can play off one elephant against another, we can play for time, we can even use a little guile and diplomacy, but in the end, we’ve got to move.

We also have trade negotiations in the offing with Australia and New Zealand, who want free trade conditions throughout the region. The upcoming PACER+ negotiations are arguably our most pressing challenge, and according to PiPP, the most controversial. The potential exists for free trade conditions to be imposed throughout the region, with the result that government revenues for some Pacific Island nations could decrease by as much as 30%. Such a drop in revenues would be one step shy of disastrous for Vanuatu.

The most likely outcome from such a scenario would be increased dependence on foreign aid. And given the circumstances, it’s one wonders how Vanuatu would feel about approaching either of its nearest donor neighbours hat in hand. That would leave the EU, hardly more attractive, or China, whose history of hands-off, no-questions-asked support might lead to backsliding in transparency and consultation in development processes.

Vanuatu and its Pacific Island neighbours are huddled together on a rather small bed with some very large would-be paramours. The years ahead will require every ounce of tact and nimbleness we can muster.

I got some really good feedback from last week’s proposal to create incentives for those kinds of computer equipment that are most suited to creating opportunity and improving access to information for ni-Vanuatu.

Not all of the news was necessarily good, but all of it was useful. Daryl Moon, who runs the local Datec store, responded that he’d done a little math on the issue, and he found that computer vendors would certainly be able to sell computers for less if they were constructed locally from tariff-exempt components.

But he went on to explain that in order to justify hiring extra staff for that purpose, he would have to sell 20 computers per week – a number which, he suspected, exceeds the weekly sales of all local computer retailers combined.

I also had discussion with a few local economists and trade experts. One of the issues raised was the difficulty of actually measuring the outcome of such tariff exemptions. Generally speaking, government is willing to accept a drop in revenues in one area provided that it sees an increase elsewhere (VAT income from increased sales, for example) or that the social benefit is sufficient to merit the cost.

As I reflect on these conversations, I’m beginning to realise that, ultimately, the most compelling argument for Appropriate Technology incentives is not economic in nature. The capstone on this discussion is a moral one.

We need to take steps to improve access to information, learning and communications for all ni-Vanuatu. The steps we’ve taken so far are necessary, but not sufficient. We need to do more. And in the absence of a coordinated national strategy, we should take small steps like this simply because we can.

The cost of failure is measurable, and probably low. Maybe there won’t be a huge surge of new employment; maybe it won’t help local small business people as much as we like. If it doesn’t work, though, at least they won’t suffer for the mistake.

Though we can’t really know exactly what the value is on the upside, we can all agree that if it does work, it will benefit people in countless small ways: expediting business, enabling both formal and informal political, social, religious and community networks, encouraging learning and exposing people to a world that many have never encountered before.

The benefits are likely to be intangible and difficult to measure: One more scholarship won because a young woman studied extra at home on her netbook. A few extra bookings at a resort via email that kept one more person employed. A better-attended fund-raising for an important cause. None of these will ever show up directly in a statistical analysis, but nobody doubts their value.

There are liabilities inherent to the idea, of course. As I cautioned last week, if the Appropriate Technology designation is reduced to a laundry list of specific products approved by government, ample room might be created for error, inefficiency or even abuse. If a local vendor, for example, becomes the sole distributor for a given brand of products, then succeeds – by hook or by crook – in getting them included in the list, they would stand to profit more than before. Conversely, if other vendors were to lobby to block the inclusion of a certain brand of products, that same sole distributor might find itself working at a deficit.

The solution is to ensure that the criteria for this list are generic in nature, and are described in functional language that references the purpose and performance of a given product rather than its name, version, manufacturer, what have you.

Low-power devices, for example, could simply be classed as any computing device that uses less than X number of watts under normal circumstances. While the value of X might float higher and lower as we fine-tune things, the criterion is clear enough that equipment clearly either meets or misses the mark, with little room for ambiguity or misapplication.

Now: Let’s pause for a second and look at the bigger picture. This kind of proposal should really be part of a larger dialogue about a national ICT strategy. It’s unfortunate, actually, that one of the strengths of the argument for an Appropriate Technology tariff exemption is that it stands on its own and doesn’t necessarily need to be integrated into a larger framework. By rights it should be leading us to bigger things.

My hope is that ideas like this start people thinking in strategic terms. The idea of liberalising the telecoms market is a similarly simple (albeit more ambitious) idea that was led by a stalwart few within Government, but which ultimately involved many parties, nationally and internationally. One of the greatest benefits we derived from this (after the obvious win of vastly improved mobile communications) was the creation of a regulatory body to oversee things.

When the Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Utilities first embarked on the long road toward an open telecoms market, I’m not sure everyone realised the full implications of the work they’d taken on. Happily, with assistance from numerous parties, the idea served as a fulcrum to develop the will and then the resources necessary to make this undertaking an internationally noteworthy success story.

I confess I’m a little nervous that people will rest on their laurels. Mobile communications are great, but more is needed.

There’s a subtle but crucial difference between mobile communications and the Internet. It’s often hard to see because there’s a good deal of overlap between the two. Email and SMS are essentially equivalent, modulo a few small differences, as are VOIP and traditional telephone services.

Even though the lines are blurring between the two, one fundamental difference remains: Mobile telecoms enable mostly one-to-one communications. They recreate our kitchen conversations. The Internet is by default a public (one-to-many and many-to-one) medium that allows us to recreate the kind of dialogue we see in our schools, our churches, political meetings and – most importantly – in the village nasara.

Mobile Internet services soon to be available in Port Vila and Santo will blur that line even further. We need to enhance that effect, and promote devices that make best use of both technologies.

We also need to push these services out into the islands. Currently available solutions are expensive, but it’s the cost of buying and running the equipment required that shuts the door with finality for most island residents.

As happy as I am to see our capital growing in resemblance to its overseas counterparts in Australia and New Zealand, I can’t escape the realisation that, in part because of our own complacency, our brothers and sisters in the islands are still miles behind.

Small steps like an Appropriate Technology exemption are useful, especially if they lead to bigger steps further down the road.

As I write this, Vanuatu’s members of Parliament are plodding through the Government’s budget bill. It’s an unusual second consecutive week of work for our MPs, and though everyone is intent on seeing the job completed, they’re giving the work the attention it deserves.

Opposition members have kept cabinet ministers on their collective toes. Following a salvo of incisive questions from across the floor, Finance Minister Molisa sent his staff back to the Ministry with instructions for more detailed briefing materials. The lights were burning into the small hours at Finance.

Measured in strictly procedural terms, progress may be slower than Speaker George Wells might want, but the Opposition, looking revitalised and with a newfound sense of purpose, has been… well, doing its job, to be frank. That’s a refreshing – and timely – first.

It may seem silly to outsiders, but I’m not the only one here who’s taken some encouragement from these few weeks of Parliamentary process. After years of listening to the same tiresome tirades against do-nothing politicians, we are at last seeing something genuinely newsworthy in Vanuatu politics: A thorough and detailed investigation of how the nation spends its money.

There’s a little bit of wonkery to this story, procedural details that have passed largely unremarked by the general public. Here it is in a nutshell:

The Government decided to tidy up its affairs this year, putting additional expenditures from last year onto the books in a supplementary appropriation. Funds for Health, PVMC, back-pay, the Agriculture Development Bank and a fleet of new ministerial vehicles combined to push urgent, unforeseen expenditures over the 1.5% cap that Finance legislation had placed on them. In order to retroactively bring these expenses into the fold, the Government pushed through a one-time increase in the discretionary limit to 4.2%, bringing the total to slightly more than 500 million vatu.

Wait a minute – Ministerial vehicles? MP Ralph Regenvanu rightly questioned their designation as urgent and necessary expenses. He has a point, too. But equally important is the Government’s decision to bring these payments into the light of day. By submitting its past profligacy to Parliamentary scrutiny and making it clear that such retroactive increases will not recur, it was able at least to secure the integrity of the process.

As it passed the required amendment, Minister Molisa assured MPs that the change to 4.2% would be reverted via new legislation to be introduced immediately following consideration of this year’s budget. This would require an extraordinary session, but that had been accounted for in the planning. Better to keep MPs around for a few more days and see the job done right than to work – literally – in half measures.

The Opposition had their own agenda, too. Following a realignment that left veteran parliamentarian Sato Kilman in the fore, they embarked on a concerted and effective campaign, forcing the Government to defend its policy priorities and the spending they entailed. MPs Moana Carcasses Kalosil and Ralph Regenvanu were often in the thick of things, posing informed and detailed questions concerning Government’s spending priorities. They arrived in the House prepared, with notes in hand, and maintained an unprecedented level of cohesion in opposing those spending measures they felt did not meet the standards they set out.

PM Natapei’s coalition, itself demonstrating a high degree of unity and preparation, has carried every vote so far. But the heightened scrutiny required that they spend longer than originally planned on the appropriation bill. And here’s where it gets interesting.

The law states that budget bills can only be considered in ordinary sessions of Parliament, so the extraordinary session scheduled to follow (to revert the changes to the supplementary spending limits) wouldn’t do. All right, then, said Government, we’ll just tack a second ordinary session onto the first, and then add an extraordinary session after that, should we need one.

What with the robust scrutiny the budget bill is receiving, it appears they do. So the Parliamentary marathon seems set to continue.

Some will no doubt moan about the cost, but I say it’s worth every penny. In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen Parliament working quite as well as it is right now. Government is taking steps to keep future hands out of the cookie jar, and what’s more has owned up to the crumbs on the counter.

For their part, the Opposition have done what a good Opposition is supposed to do – they’ve challenged, pushed, prodded and demanded answers. To its credit, Edward Natapei’s government, most notably Finance Minister Molisa, have stood up to the scrutiny and held their ground.

The result? Our parliamentarians seem (at last!) to be moving beyond a musical chairs approach to government and taking the role of governing seriously.

No doubt everyone’s feeling a little weary right now, and some may be grumbling about the expense and inconvenience of keeping Parliament in session into another week. I say we stay the course. Government is doing its job. This, truly, is the price of democracy, and if you ask me, it’s money well spent.

We need fiber, and we need it soon.

No, I’m not talking about changing the nation’s diet. I’m talking about fiber-optic cable. Made of very long strands of glass fiber, this kind of cable has the unique ability to allow light to turn corners. This means that we can shoot tiny laser pulses into one end of it and have them emerge intact from the other end, even if it’s thousands of kilometers away.

The result? Fast, very high-capacity communications become possible. In laboratory experiments, researchers have achieved rates of up to 14 trillion bits of data per second. Current commercial implementations don’t go nearly that fast, but even a single thread of fiber a few millimeters wide can carry billions of bits every second. Just a few strands would be enough to increase Vanuatu’s total available bandwidth to a large multiple of its current capacity.

So what’s the catch? Why haven’t we invested in a fiber connection yet? Fiji has it, and so does New Caledonia. Why not Vanuatu?

The stock reply is that it’s too expensive right now. But that answer is a little too pat. In order to understand how why nobody has done more than contemplate a fiber link with the rest of the world, we need to understand a thing or two about large-scale projects.

The Christmas edition of the Economist magazine features an article examining the results of the recently collapsed US housing bubble. The author writes that when there’s a boom in investment in material goods (as opposed to finance funds or other services), the prospect of benefits down the line sometimes create a speculator’s market.

People invest large amounts of money, often more than the actual long-term value of the goods produced, but rationalise it by their investment’s resale value. In Florida in the 1920s, land speculation reached such a fever pitch that some people were buying vastly inflated properties and flipping them the very same day.

When the bubble finally did collapse, investors lost their shirts. But that was inevitable; the amount of money invested was way out of line with the actual value of the properties. People’s perception of the properties’ value lost touch with reality.

Most people take a pretty simple (and valid) lesson from this: Avoid speculative investments. Don’t bet the farm and you won’t lose it.

But what happens when the potential benefits of a speculative venture could change the economic landscape? The channel tunnel linking England and France, the Panama Canal and the Golden Gate Bridge were all immense undertakings that opened new doors to business, but whose cost made even the most stout-hearted blanch.

The channel tunnel’s construction was backed by a bond issue, but because of cost overruns of nearly 80% of the original estimate, the tunnel operator has faced chronic financial difficulties. The first attempt to join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by a French consortium failed in 1898. The US took over, and justified the immense cost for strategic reasons. The Panama Canal vastly improved America’s ability to project its naval power in the region. Begun during the Great Depression, the Golden Gate Bridge was underwritten entirely by the San Francisco-based Bank of America. The last bridge bond was paid off in 1971, a full 37 years after the bridge was completed. In 2006 its operating deficit was estimated at $80 million for the next 5 years.

In each case, the project was (or became) a labour of love for the investors. But the benefit to the larger community was immense, and of enduring value. And this is exactly the point that the Economist makes. Whatever fond hopes prompted people to commit, and whatever the fate of investors, the edifice remains and is still innately valuable.

Given the size of our respective economies, laying a fiber cable to Vanuatu is similar in scale to each of these projects. For some years now, people throughout the Pacific region have been weighing the benefits of fiber optic links against the relatively large financial investment required.

The problem has been sliced, diced and analysed nearly to death. I’d hesitate to say, though, that we’ve really come to grips once crucial detail: The government of Vanuatu simply can’t pony up the tens of millions of dollars required. So who else could pay?

The cost of laying a cable between Port Vila and Nouméa (the nearest location with existing fiber) would cost in the tens of millions. Annual operating fees would likely be in the millions as well. But compared to satellite communications, the cost per megabyte of pushing data over such a link would be much lower.

That’s one reason to move. But what happens to significant investment in infrastructure that our carriers have already made? In Digicel’s case, they’ve only just started to see a return on about $30 million invested. Given the state of financial markets today, would cost savings be enough to motivate them to turn around and drop half as much again – possibly more – so soon after their initial outlay?

TVL may be better positioned to consider this. They’ve been investing heavily in recent months, but that’s consisted mostly of incremental improvements to their existing infrastructure. Arguably, they wouldn’t face as much difficulty integrating fiber into their plans.

Laying the cable isn’t the end of the investment, though. Vastly increasing the size and the quality of our link to the outside world is one thing, but we have to be able to use it. The price of connecting to TVL’s urban fiber loop here in Vila is shockingly high right at the moment. I’m aware of few businesses that have even contemplated purchasing a link. Wireless Internet services from several providers will be rolling out soon, but we don’t know yet what access speeds they’ll be offering, nor what value-added network services they intend to provide.

A Vanuatu-based investor in fiber faces a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Local bandwidth won’t increase radically until international capacity does, but if you increase international capacity via a fiber link, you sure as shootin’ don’t want to wait years for the market to mature.

Normally, this is where government steps in. They guarantee a loan (or offer some kind of concessionary deal) that allows the investor to recoup their outlay over a longer period of time. As I’ve said, though, the government of Vanuatu can’t do that. They manage their financial house moderately well, but there’s no such thing as extra cash in their budget.

The government could bring tools other than financial into the mix, though. By exercising a little regulatory discretion they could help create an environment that rewarded long-term thinking while at the same time ensuring that this new resource is open and accessible to all.

The bottom line is this: The economic benefits of a fiber-optic connection to the outside world cannot be overstated. But it’s got to be seen as a labour of love. The benefits to be derived from the operation of the cable itself might never be great. If it’s not managed properly, the cost of failure could be high indeed. That said, the knock-on benefits to the community are numerous.

Call center services for European customers, online education, interactive tourism resources (video feed from the Nangol, anyone?), live video lectures from universities overseas, online consultations by medical specialists, offshore financial transaction processing… the list goes on and on. All of this becomes possible if we improve our basic infrastructure.

All we need is to find someone foolish – or far-sighted – enough to foot the bill.

Micro-payment for Internet content is not flawed in and of itself. Like so many nice ideas, though, it has few decent exemplars at this stage of the development of the Internet.

People will find a way to manage micro-payments, and some people will profit thereby. Why? Because people are willing to reward people for their contributions. Radiohead made significant profits from the online release of their album ‘In Rainbows’. Many people paid more than the recommended minimum contribution Radiohead requested. President Obama’s online campaign was premised not on sales but on the moral argument that people should participate in the process of change. The monetary exchange in each case was symbolic; it was not payment for services rendered but reward for exemplary behaviour.

This really is the crux of the issue: Internet content is part of a gift economy, an economy of plenitude that bears a stronger resemblance to the West Coast native practice of potlatch than anything Adam Smith might have envisioned.

Simply put, people don’t pay for things on the Internet; they don’t have to. So we create content as a labour of love, and if people value it, they reward us, first with their attention, then, in certain circumstances, with their material support.

I put all my columns and photos online simply out of a desire to communicate. The fact that I’ve been able to parlay this output into a consultancy that is earning me more now than my previous salaried position is more than a happy accident, that’s true. My web presence is my calling card. But I would publish my material online regardless. The bottom line is that I love the act of creation, and I feel gratified when people derive some value from it.

Some people have recognised my expertise in my particular niche of the online world – and its applicability to their needs – and that provides enough income enough to keep me working online. Their rewards make my online work possible.

Lastly: Seth’s response is based on a false premise. The vast majority of Open Source developers are well remunerated for their efforts. This is a perfect case in point: Those who benefit from an improved environment (in this case, commoditised, easily customised software) are usually willing to reward those whose work improves it.

None of us have a well-developed understanding of how things will play out in online content creation. But we have to stop thinking about it in terms of product and sale. It’s reward for services rendered.

Much has been written since New Year’s about the rise in bus fares. Scarcely a day goes by but someone submits a long and thoughtful letter deploring the increase and suggesting ways to help drivers earn more without charging more.

The reasons for this are obvious. If someone takes the bus to and from work every day, they now spend 6,600 vatu a month just for the privilege of keeping their job. And that’s ignoring using the bus for anything but work. Add in a trip to the market on the weekend, a few visits with family in the course of the week, bus fare for the children to get to and from school… suddenly transportation takes a bigger slice of the household income than just about everything except rent.

We’ve known for some time that it’s very hard for the average ni-Vanuatu to make a living wage. Just about every family I know supplements their cash income via informal channels. They run tiny little mom-and-pop nakamals and road markets that are profitable only because family in the village send them produce at only slightly more than cost. They sew or repair much of what they wear, and wear it until it’s unrecoverable. They grow what they can on whatever land they have. They hold fund-raising when cash shortages become critical.

None of that is enough. The plain fact is this: The more people depend on the cash economy in Vanuatu, the more poor people we will see.

Moving from a completely land-based to a market-based economy is never easy. Nowhere in the world has the transition been painless. France, England, the US and Australia have all gone through agonising hardship and even military conflict as a result of this process.

We’re not going to start fighting any time soon in Vanuatu, but unless we take special care to protect ourselves, we will soon be seeing real hardship.

This country finds its greatest strength in the land. Much of kastom is based on ownership and place. Status, rank and inheritance in all their many permutations are reactions to the particularities of each island environment. Our country’s fertility has given its people a resilience that allowed them to survive a series of technological and cultural transitions that have impoverished others.

It still does, too. Vanuatu’s bounty means that, in large parts of the country, people don’t want for a lot of cash and therefore don’t bother to extract the full potential from their land. The cash economy remains small in rural Vanuatu because the cash economy is only a small part of the whole picture.

When some desirable product (like mobile communications, for example) is introduced, the perceived need for cash increases. In the short term, this puts stress on the pocket book, but things work themselves out through a nominal increase in the amount of cash being generated. Sell a little more kava or coffee and everything is back to normal. Add to this the increased efficiencies that come hand in hand with better communications, and we see more prosperity and economic activity – in cash terms – than less.

In other words, this is not a zero sum game.

But once the inherent economic elasticity in this system is used up, poverty sets in. People planting cash crops in places once reserved for food crops soon learn about hunger. It’s a fine line between building the cash economy and building dependence on the cash economy in such as way that a person’s outputs can’t meet their costs.

And that is exactly what’s beginning to happen in town. People have already leveraged their ties to the land in order to make their move into the material world possible. They supplemented their income with food and family support in order to use that monthly 20,000 vatu for essentials.

A market economy is a mobile economy. Where life in Vanuatu seldom required more than one’s legs or a paddle for transport, now we find ourselves bound by the need to cover large distances every day. And you can’t grow a bus.

Worse, Port Vila’s size and density are increasing. There are fewer and fewer places left to plant food or even keep chickens. Because wages have always relied on the agricultural backbone for subsidy, people in the workforce today are finding it harder than ever to get by. Agricultural and family support are receding faster than earning power is increasing.

We need to act now. The government has recognised this, but unfortunately the legislation that resulted was not carefully considered. The carrying capacity of both the cash and traditional economies need to be carefully measured and balanced.

Bus fares had to increase. They’ve been stagnant for nearly a decade. But further steps need to be taken to ensure that people can earn the extra money they need in today’s economy. Playing with the number of buses isn’t enough. We need comprehensive answers.

The ground is shifting under our feet. Government, business owners, employees and villagers alike need to work together now to leverage Vanuatu’s land wealth into economic health.

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation – Robert Frost

This quotation is one of those handy catch-all phrases that scholars love to use to explain – and often excuse – people’s inability to capture the essence of a statement when it’s translated between languages and cultures. Examples of miscommunication between peoples are everywhere.

One of the most startling examples of the limits to cross-cultural communication occurred during US-Russian nuclear talks. Disarmament expert Geoffrey Forden writes:

‘It turns out that when the US START II treaty negotiators tried to explain to their Russian counterparts the need for a “strategic reserve” of nuclear warheads, they called it a hedge. The Russian interpreters alternately translated that as either “cheat” or “shrub”.’

You can imagine the confusion and consternation this would have caused. More than poetry was at stake in this particular translation.

The continuing confrontation between the government of Vanuatu and business interests over recent amendments to the Employment Act is being exacerbated by exactly such a syndrome. Either through unwillingness or inability to bridge the gap between cultures, needs and concerns, people on both sides of the issue now find themselves staring each other down.

The fuse has been lit on an issue that could have explosive impact on ni-Vanuatu and expat alike, but nobody seems to be able to step forward and quench it.

The majority of business owners recognise the need for improved economic conditions, in the abstract at least. But ask them about the details and one quickly encounters significant intransigence. In one particularly spirited discussion I was reminded that much of Vanuatu’s cash economy was supplemented by informal transactions at the family and village level. That’s true, but does nothing to diminish the fact that Vanuatu’s minimum wage is too small to live on.

Recent studies have shown that many village livelihoods are significantly supplemented by transfers of cash from family members in town. Food from the garden no longer comes free for much of our workforce.

I remain convinced that Minister Crowby introduced these recent amendments with the best of intentions. There might be something to the intimations that there’s political hay being made, but I see nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Helping one’s constituents is the very essence of a politician’s role.

It’s also likely that the details of the legislative changes were inspired by a mistaken perception of just how much of a burden local businesses can realistically bear. That too is understandable. One needs only walk the streets of Nambatri to see the stark contrast between walled expat compounds on one side of the road and corrugated tin shacks on the other. Any observer could be forgiven for believing that the distribution of wealth in Vanuatu is decidedly uneven.

But there’s a vast distance between understanding the fact of these economic disparities and understanding the mechanisms that bring them about.

Vanuatu society’s most salient feature is the collective refusal to allow any individual to raise himself so far above the others as to be out of reach. There are no kings here. Imagine how it feels, then, to walk several kilometres to work every morning, breathing the dust of countless Hilux trucks roaring past at speed.

Ask the driver about this, and they’ll reply with the central tenet of capitalist culture: If you work hard, some day you can be the one in the Hilux.

That’s true enough. But even at twice the minimum wage, that truck will be forever out of reach.

In times past, village chiefs used to carefully arbitrate the use of land and resources in order to make sure that nobody went without and nobody – himself included – got too much. Their carefully cultivated humility is a direct response to the sharp-eyed jealousy that drives island egalitarianism.

As far as I can tell, Minister Crowby is playing the role of chief. He’s spotted an inequity and decided to correct it by adjusting the proportions to be distributed to employer and employee alike. The numbers, of course, are wrong. But only when viewed through the capitalist lens.

Of course, that’s the only lens we have when dealing in a market economy. A supplier in Australia isn’t going to drop its prices just because we want to get a higher mark-up without raising our own rate, no matter how good our intentions are. They might sympathise with our plight, but their sympathy stops at the cash register.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a capitalist system, and that system cannot bear the onerous burden placed on it by these new amendments. Whatever his intentions, Minister Crowby must accept this indisputable truth.

We need to find common ground. We need to find a way to bring the market into the nasara. We need to know our place, too. Capitalism is a compelling force, but it’s not stronger than kastom here in Vanuatu. We need to recognise and validate the chief’s role, to recognise his imperatives as well as our own.

That’s not an easy job, but it’s got to start now, before these conflicting cultures clash.